MSI Geforce 9600 GT 1Gb Hybrid Freezer VGA Review

The MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer is equipped with 1Gb DDR3 memory and features an unique cooling solution which works passively when in 2D mode, and only makes noise when running 3D applications or games. MSI overclocked the GPU and Shader for increased performance, let´s find out how it compares to a vanilla Geforce 9600 GT.

Introduction & Specs

Introduction

NVIDIA launched the midrange Geforce 9600 GT earlier this year, but with heavy competition from AMD showing up early summer manufacturers have to get creative to be able to sell the 9600 GT GPU, as its performance level was reduced to entry level as the 9800 GT and 9800 GTX+ now take the midrange spot.

MSI took the NVIDIA 9600 GT reference design and shook it up quite a bit, they added a 2 slot cooling which can work without active cooling at low load levels, they upped the total onboard memory to 1Gb and gave it a fancy name:

Specifications

We have tested quite a bit of different 9600 GT cards here at Madshrimps since they originally launched, stock clocked, speedier GPU, better memory, fancy cooling, we had the lot. A quick recap of the original 9600 GT specs:

The MSI 9600 GT Hybrid Freezer comes factory overclocked:

GPU: 700Mhz

Shader: 1700Mhz

Memory type remains GDDR3 but size is doubled to 1Gb. The GPU clocks are not the highest we’ve seen, but they are quite respectable. Let’s have a closer look at the N9600GT